Joe Rogan’s AI Government Idea Draws Stark Warning From Ethics Expert - Newsweek

Joe Rogan's suggestion that artificial intelligence (AI) could play a larger role in government decision-making has prompted concern from an AI ethics expert.

Governments, militaries and business leaders are already using AI tools for analysis and decision support, raising questions about how much authority such systems should have over high-stakes choices.

Rogan's comments arrived amid a growing discussion about whether AI can help solve complex political and geopolitical problems more effectively than human leaders. At the same time, researchers and ethicists are warning that increasing reliance on AI risks weakening human judgment and accountability in critical decisions.

Newsweek reached out to Rogan's representative via email for comment on Sunday.

Professor Shannon Vallor, Baillie Gifford Chair in the Ethics of Data and AI at the University of Edinburgh and Co-Director of the Centre for Technomoral Futures, told Newsweek that the idea of AI playing a significant role in government is no longer theoretical.

"It’s very realistic," she said, arguing that decision-making and analysis are already being delegated to AI across a range of institutions, including military organizations.

According to Vallor, this trend extends beyond government. She pointed to surveys showing many CEOs in the United States and United Kingdom are increasingly turning to AI chatbots for decision support, adding that political leaders are adopting similar practices. For example, earlier this year, market research agency 3Gem found that out of 200 UK CEOs surveyed, 62 percent use AI to make their decisions.

She also cited recent reports suggesting AI failures have contributed to serious international security incidents, including Bloomberg's report that overreliance on AI was a factor in the February 28 bombing of Shajarah Tayyebeh Elementary School in Iran.

During a recent conversation on The Joe Rogan Experience, the podcast host suggested that sufficiently advanced AI could potentially make more rational decisions than humans by analyzing vast amounts of information without the emotional, partisan or personal biases that often shape politics.

"The problem is always leaders," Rogan said. "It's not that human beings inherently want to go to war with people they don't know from another part of the world."

He added: "It sounds like a crazy hope, but my hope is that as AI becomes more and more omnipresent, as we start farming off various tasks to it, one of the things that we're gonna farm off is government."

"Imagine a war where it stops. All war stops on the planet."

While the discussion around AI often focuses on technical reliability, Vallor has said a deeper danger lies in what happens to human decision-makers when they become overly dependent on automation.

She said that regularly outsourcing judgment to AI could lead to what she called "cognitive deskilling," reducing people's ability to think critically and evaluate complex situations for themselves.

Vallor said this process could also create "moral deskilling," where leaders become less capable of weighing the human consequences of their actions because they have grown accustomed to deferring difficult choices to machines.

In matters involving war and conflict, she said that raised profound ethical concerns.

"AI systems cannot understand the human and moral stakes of war," Vallor said. Because machines do not possess lived experience, emotions or personal interests, they cannot truly comprehend the value of human life.

Vallor said the answer was not entirely negative. She acknowledged that properly designed AI systems could serve useful functions in military organizations when deployed for narrow, clearly defined tasks.

Examples include logistics planning, supply-chain optimization and weather forecasting for missions.

However, she distinguished those applications from general-purpose AI chatbots, which she described as unreliable substitutes for human judgment.

Even beneficial uses bring new risks, she said, because mistakes in high-stakes environments can have serious consequences. For that reason, Vallor argued that organizations must carefully evaluate and control AI-related risks instead of assuming technological advances will automatically improve decision-making.

In Vallor's view, trust requires accountability, and accountability ultimately rests with people, not software.

"We can never trust an AI system with such decisions," she said.

Although governments may be able to rely on AI systems when there is strong evidence they perform a specific task reliably, she said human decision-makers must remain responsible for outcomes and failures.

Vallor stated that current systems lack both the safeguards and accountability structures needed for broader deployment in national-security decision-making.

Beyond the technical debate, Vallor sees Rogan's comments as part of a broader cultural shift in attitudes toward leadership and authority.

She said enthusiasm for handing more responsibility to AI reflected declining confidence in human judgment and democratic decision-making. According to Vallor, growing acceptance of machine-led decision-making risks encouraging people to become more passive about choices that directly affect their lives.

As AI capabilities continue to advance, pressure is likely to grow on governments and military institutions to determine where the technology should and should not be used.

Vallor's warning highlights a central question facing policymakers: whether AI should remain a tool that informs decisions or become something that increasingly shapes them.

Newsweek’s reporters and editors used Martyn, our AI assistant, to produce this story. Learn more about Martyn here.

Contact Newsweek editors on this story: Megan Cartwright and Cristina Diciu.